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Grrr. What's up with hotel WiFi login pages?

Q. Why do hotels and other places lock up their WiFi with Web logins? It would be nice to bring a Chromecast to a hotel, but it can't connect through that kind of access. A. Businesses that make guests click

Q. Why do hotels and other places lock up their WiFi with Web logins? It would be nice to bring a Chromecast to a hotel, but it can't connect through that kind of access.

A. Businesses that make guests click past a form on a Web page to get on the Internet don't do that just to avoid endless "what's the WiFi password?" questions from guests, but to stage a conversation online with their customers.

That's possible because a Web login to WiFi gives the owner of that network the guest's undivided attention. These "captive portal" systems work by routing all Web traffic to that one page until the customer clicks through. (That's also why your browser and other apps with an encrypted connection to an Internet site or service will instantly freak out with security alerts.)

A typical WiFi login page will offer some of the following pitches:

• Basic information about the place, presumably to make you feel better about having chosen it. This may include access to other sites online. For example, last winter you could use Facebook for free on Gogo's inflight WiFi, courtesy of a marketing deal that Chicago-based wireless firm inked with Charmin.

• Ads from third parties that make the business a little extra money. But that can come at a cost in customer annoyance. Last summer, San Francisco International Airport dumped the ads from its WiFi and cut a tedious login process down to a single click.

Those are all legitimate business reasons to make a customer jump through this hoop, even if they do cut out devices like Google's Chromecast that don't feature their own Web browser.

I'm less excited to see a WiFi login page used only to make me agree to a long list of terms and conditions that boil down to "there are bad people on the Internet, if they mess up your computer or offend your sensibilities it's not our fault, and you can't sue us for that or anything else." This "clickwrap" legalese is probably enforceable -- you did click an I-agree button before connecting -- but it still represents a waste of pixels.

I also dislike having to pass an I-agree page after entering a traditional WiFi password, but that's exactly what I experienced at an otherwise great bed-and-breakfast the other weekend. An airport lounge in Brussels compounded that annoyance by requiring me to ask an attendant for a piece of paper with a randomly generated password -- good only for one hour of access! -- and then type that into the login page.

The worst captive-portal logins of all, however, guard wireless networks with generic, widely-used names like "guest." The result: As you're walking by, your phone sees a network name it had memorized before at some other location, it automatically connects, and it's instantly knocked offline until you realize what happened.

Wireless routers can keep working for years and years, but Apple's AirPort models can die of incompatibility instead of old age. You can only configure them through Apple's own software. And the current version of that AirPort Utility program only supports routers that can run the 802.11n version of WiFi, which rules out pre-2007 AirPort Extreme base stations and pre-2008 AirPort Expresses.

The catch: The current version of OS X refuses to run the old AirPort Utility version that can still talk to those older AirPorts. Windows, however, doesn't have that hang-up -- which is how I could install a 2009-vintage copy of Apple's AirPort app in Windows 8.1 and use it to configure a first-generation AirPort Express.

I've complimented Apple's software in the past for being a lot simpler and more elegant than the